entertainment developments, themed restaurants, multiplex cinemas and mega-
stores provide no useful stimulation to the senses, soul or imagination but rather a
palpable sense of disintegration; not connection and community but banishment;
spaces like the airport transit lounge where the traveller lapses into a trance of
confused time-zones and a sense of in-between-places. I ronically, in such zones
the narrative returns to the collective; the culturally non-specific language of
pictographs to give superficial meaning to our lives; to denote male and female
toilets, customs clearance, non- smoking areas, entry, exit and prohibited areas,
nationals this way, aliens that way.
MLC, however, discerns or ascribes an implicit subtext to place; a layering of
meaning that is embodied in its representation as setting but which in normal
consciousness would be indiscernible to the sensate eye. I n a mythopoeic
narrative, we read the surface of place and uncover the hidden layers, the
palimpsest, the narratives and the possibilities of elsewhere-place. We do this
through metaphor and symbolism, the writer being merely the medium through
which the I maginal Realm is accessed, a process that has been described in the
following way:
The literary meaning of the experience of place and the literary
experience of that meaning of place are both part of an active
process of cultural creation and destruction. They do not start or
stop with an author. They do not reside in the text. They are not
contained in the production and distribution of the work. They do
not begin or end with the pattern and nature of the readership.
They are a function of all these things and more. They are all
moments in a cumulatively historical spiral of signification (Thrift,
1981:12-13).
That ‘cumulatively historical spiral of signification’ is the place-elsewhere-
place archetype, one that has resonance with that of the Great Mother archetype.
Marie-Louise von Franz suggests that the concept of matter derives from the
archetype of the Great Mother and may be found in the personal images of
paradise, the kingdom of God, heaven, earth, a piece of land, the forest, the sea,
matter, the underworld, the moon, the cave and the tree, among others.
Psychologically, it is whatever is kindly, sheltering, it is places of transformation; “ ...
all these images belong to the Great Mother” (von Franz, 1988:15-16).
I f we consider the relationship of this archetype to the archetype of the self,
what emerges is a dynamic that is inherently relational, where the self seeks to
encompass place. Jung described the self as not only the centre but also the